What’s up with… Deutsche Telekom, Verizon, Cisco, Telus

• Deutsche Telekom lays out aspirations
• Verizon turns to Cisco for NFV boost
• Telus brings Samsung into its 5G fold

Verizon and Cisco have teamed up to bolster the operator’s ongoing NFV efforts, while Deutsche Telekom shares bold plans with its shareholders.

• Deutsche Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges (pictured above, left, with chairman Ulrich Lehner) was in bullish mood during the operator’s first ever virtual shareholders’ meeting, stating that the operator had set targets to be the 5G leader at home, the mobile market leader in the US (via T-Mobile US) and “become the No. 1 fiber-optic company in Germany and Europe. We will help to drive forward the digitalization of Europe.”
• Verizon has bolstered its Virtual Network Services offering with Cisco’s 5000 Series Enterprise Network Compute System (ENCS), a “compute platform optimized for Network Function Virtualization,” according to the operator. Basically, then, Verizon is suggesting that enterprises using its virtual network functions (VNFs), such as firewalls and routers, should deploy the Cisco server to make onboarding and VNF management easier. There’s life left in the old NFV dog yet! 
• Canadian operator Telus has launched its 5G network and added Samsung as a new 5G infrastructure supplier. As the operator already works with Ericsson and Nokia, this suggests that Huawei will not be playing any role in the Telus 5G rollout.
• Orange has been told by a French court to pay Digicel €250 million in damages and interest after the operator giant was deemed guilty of anti-competitive practices, reports Reuters. 
• AT&T has announced itself firmly in support of the recent Supreme Court ruling for the continuation of DACA – the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in the US. This ruling allows nearly 700,000 young immigrants who came to the country as children – some of whom are AT&T employees – to continue to have the opportunity to work and study in the US without the threat of deportation, it says. 
• Paranoia much. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison says the country is under broad cyber attack from a "sophisticated state-based actor," but they’re targeting all sorts: political entities, government departments, health, education, and operators of essential services and critical infrastructure. Who could it be?
• Nokia says it has successfully completed a series of Over-the-Air (OTA) 5G NR (new radio) drive tests in C-band spectrum (between 3.4 GHz and 4.2 GHz) in Dallas, Texas. An auction of C-band spectrum is due to be held in December.
• Keen to offer as many distributed cloud options as possible, AWS has unveiled Snowcone, a tiny edge computing device that could be of use in temporary deployments or remote locations. 
• 5G mmWave tech specialist Pivotal Commware is the latest company to join the Open RAN Policy Coalition, a growing group of operators and vendors formed to “promote policies to advance the adoption of open and interoperable Radio Access Network (RAN) solutions.” 

- The staff, TelecomTV